How Marvel Unified Its Movie Universe (and Why That Won’t Be Easy for DC)

Kevin Feige. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

In the midst of the massive geek Mecca that is San Diego Comic-Con, the big Marvel Studios movie panel had all the theater of a presidential campaign rally. Tom Hiddleston appeared in costume as Loki, the bad guy from Thor, and rallied the crowd in character. Then: so many movie stars, including the full casts of the upcoming Captain America sequel and Guardians of the Galaxy. And just when it seemed like it was over, Joss Whedon, patron saint of nerds, walked out for a Steve Jobsian one-more-thing and introduced the first teaser for The Avengers sequel. Eight thousand fans, some of whom had been waiting in line since the night before, shrieked like their souls were being ripped from their bodies.

Back in 2006, the very first Marvel Studios panel didn’t have quite the same swagger. Iron Man director Jon Favreau was there, and it was like, the Swingers guy? Louis Letterier was insisting his version of the Hulk would wash away the arty taste of Ang Lee’s earlier version, while Edgar Wright promised Ant-Man, like he always does. In the middle of it all was the stalwart, relaxed studio president Kevin Feige, the man with a production credit on just about every movie and TV show with a Marvel character for the last 13 years.

Inevitably, a fan stood up and asked whether any of the Marvel characters might cross over into each others’ movies, the way they often do in the comic books. “Who knows?” Feige answered. “This is a big new experiment for Marvel. But it’s no coincidence that we have the rights to Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap—” and the crowd started to cheer that soul-tearing cheer. That moment, Feige later recalls, was when he started thinking that he could build a series of interrelated movies, the cinematic equivalent of what comics nerds call “continuity.” He wanted do something that only comic book villains ever think they can get away with: build a universe.

Feige’s—and Marvel’s—subsequent success is about more than fanboy and fangirl dreams, however. Comic book superheroes are intellectual property, and the Walt Disney Company, Marvel’s corporate parent, takes the profit potential of this universe very seriously. And just as Disney owns Marvel, Time Warner owns Marvel’s chief competitor DC, home of a whole other roster of heroes like Superman, Batman, and the Flash. Movies based on DC comics have a spotty record; there’s The Dark Knight, sure, but you also have Superman Returns, Green Lantern, Watchmen, and a litany of failures-to-launch with Wonder Woman.

Which brings us back to this year’s Comic-Con, where director Zack Snyder orchestrated his own bit of theater at the Warner Bros. panel by announcing his follow-up to Man of Steel: a crossover between Superman and Batman that will be the first step to creating a shared DC film universe culminating in an epic team-up, Justice League. So now the question isn’t “How does Kevin Feige ride herd over a collection of interrelated comic-book movies?” The better question is, “Can anyone else?”

Jon Favreau in Iron Man. Image: Marvel

Back in the days before everyone knew to stick around through the credits of a superhero movie for an extra scene, Samuel L. Jackson showing up at the end of Iron Man was nothing more than an Easter egg, a joke for the faithful. It was no different than the time George Clooney’s Batman wisecracked that disobedient sidekicks were the reason Superman works alone (a thing that actually happened in a real movie). Feige changed that.

When Favreau’s Iron Man became a hit, the Jackson cameo at the end and a few other Easter eggs became the key to a new kind of franchise, a movie universe that had architecture. “I could arguably say what we’re planning for the year 2021,” Feige told WIRED. “Will that happen? I don’t know. But what we planned for 2015 in 2006 is happening.”

Since its inception Marvel always had a tighter continuity than DC, but that doesn’t mean the movies had to work that way. For years, in fact, they didn’t. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four were contracted to Fox, and Spider-Man to Sony. Under that structure, those characters would never meet. When Marvel became an independent production company in 2009, though, it retained the rights to many of the other characters with less recognition among non-fans and even casual readers. Once Iron Man proved that Marvel could take one of those B-grade heroes and turn him into a hit, the company could try to translate the formula to others.

When Feige went to Favreau with the idea of a scene with Jackson as Nick Fury, trying to queue up a movie that wasn’t a sequel was foreign. Now writers and directors know what they’re getting when they come to Marvel. “They had a very clear idea when we came to the table. They had a good draft of the script,” says Anthony Russo, who with his brother Joe is directing Captain America: The Winter Soldier. “They had a very good idea of what they needed and they gave us what we needed.”

In this case, say the brothers, that means they’ve been allowed—even encouraged—to make their Captain America into a 1970s-style political thriller, very different from the first movie’s 1940s war-film vibe. Joe name-checks The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men as inspirations. But that’s stylistic; the story comes straight from the comics, specifically a recent, terrific run by writer Ed Brubaker. The Russos even consulted directly with Brubaker to get it right, they say.

So where does Feige fit in? In a universe with architecture, he’s the architect. His deep knowledge of Marvel arcana helped make him an associate producer on the first X-Men movie, and since then his ability to translate that comic book knowledge into something useful to filmmakers, though, has proven nothing short of (ahem) uncanny. “Disney has allowed us to be a relatively small, tight-knit brain trust,” Feige says. “These billion-dollar ventures come down to 10 people or fewer in a room saying, ‘You know what would be cool?'”

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Feige is coordinating at least a half-dozen films in various stages of production, making sure their individual arcs serve the overall direction. He can offer writers solutions from the Marvel MacGuffin file. (Cosmic Cube? Howling Commandos? Destroyer armor?) He sees costume and makeup tests. He regularly consults with a few writers working at the comic company, but aside from Brubaker, the Russos never talked to them. That was Feige’s job. “The comics side has input, but it’s filtered through Kevin Feige,” says Anthony Russo.

“Kevin is a genius,” says Joe. “The guy is an auteur producer. There’s nobody quite like him in the business right now,” said Joe. And if Feige and the studio needed their movie to connect certain dots that would tee up Avengers 2? That was fine by the Russos.

Feige has had good luck with finding directors with visions big enough to make a movie work but not so big that they wouldn’t subsume pieces into a larger puzzle. The universe that Feige oversees is, like the real universe, expanding. The next non-sequel to come from the studio is Guardians of the Galaxy, roughly the opposite of a recognizable comic book or fan favorite.

“It has a small, rabid fan base,” Feige says, potentially overestimating both its size and its disease status. But that doesn’t matter–Marvel isn’t making Guardians because the fans demanded it. “Five years ago, looking at our plan, we knew that if Avengers was going to work, the movies had to stand alone,” he says. “Now we have to prove to the studio that we’re more than just these five characters, these five franchises.”

Guardians does that by opening up a new corner of Marveldom. Thor and even Avengers both teed up a space-opera, science-fictional set of stories. If they work, that opens the door to other space-based heroes like Nova and Captain Marvel. (Not the one who says “Shazam!” That’s DC. The Marvel one is a woman.) Eventually the purple dude introduced in the teaser at the end of Avengers, a universe-destroying Big Bad named Thanos, could even show up and unite both the Avengers and the Guardians. Good luck fitting that panel onto the stage at Hall H.

And if Guardians fails and Marvel’s space stories fall down a black hole? The studio reportedly wants to push into the psychedelic, magical parts of the canon with a movie about the sorcerer Doctor Strange, another character with a supporting cast big enough to fill another team-up. (Defenders! There, I said it.)

Feige makes it look so easy that it’s easy to wonder, well, why don’t the DC movies do the same thing? On television, the DC universe actually had a consistent continuity from 1992 to 2006, thanks to a series of wonderful cartoons sprung mostly from the minds of Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. But in the bigger-stakes world of movies, while director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was a success (and good), it didn’t even attempt to connect to anything outside itself. Nolan intentionally made his Batman the weirdest thing in an otherwise realistic world; it’s arguably the case that the biggest flaw in Dark Knight Rises was Bane, a character who kind of sort of had superpowers.

Nolan, as executive producer on Snyder’s Man of Steel, could presumably have inserted Marvel-style Easter eggs into that movie–a mention of Wayne Enterprises along with the Lexcorp references, let’s say, or someone wondering why the military didn’t call in that guy with the magic green ring. But nope. There weren’t any.

DC’s Green Lantern tried it with Angela Bassett’s character Amanda Waller, who has a connective-tissue role in the DC universe similar to Nick Fury’s in Marvel. Which makes Green Lantern an object lesson in what would have happened if Iron Man flopped: nothing. We all move on. Nothing to see here. No bigger universe.

Ask Feige what makes his particular kind of world-building possible and he says, simply, “have a plan.” It doesn’t have to be set in stone, he adds. His current estimate is that Marvel movies have been three-quarters plan and 25 percent bob-and-weave.

Ask the folks at DC and Warner Bros. who’s making that plan for them, and the answer is … not forthcoming. It could be Diane Nelson, president of DC Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based shop the company set up to push into Hollywood. Though Nelson, who handled the Harry Potter properties before coming on board at DC in 2009, isn’t a long-time comic book nerd like Feige.

It could be Geoff Johns, a comic book writer with a Hollywood background (who fans and some movie folks say was influential in the Green Lantern movie’s dive into superfluous comic book backstory). It could be Nolan, even though he hasn’t indicated any desire to do it. It could be Snyder, who loves comics but made a movie where Superman let tens of thousands of people die in Metropolis while punching an invulnerable dude. (Just saying.)

DC declined to participate in this story, and representatives wouldn’t say who, if anyone, was overseeing the broader DC cinematic universe to come. The company has announced that after Snyder’s Batman-Superman movie, it’ll make one about the Flash, and then Justice League. The Flash is also slated to appear on the CW television series Arrow, though DC hasn’t said whether it’ll be the same version of character. And since Christian Bale has said he won’t play Batman again, the movie seems likely to be a reboot, especially because Snyder seems to be taking his inspiration from the dystopian future Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns, where a sixtysomething Batman comes out of retirement and ultimately fights Superman. That’s the kind of team-up that could make joining the Justice League together awkward.

None of that means those movies will be bad. Broadly, Warner Bros. as a studio has a reputation for hiring directors at the top of their game and letting them execute a singular vision. But that also makes it a bit harder to ask them to mention the same paramilitary spy organization that’s in all these other movies over here, if they wouldn’t mind? Regardless, it’ll be difficult for Warner Bros. to start making movies that take place in a shared universe, simply because they haven’t done it yet.

“The rules of the game have been the same for us since we became Marvel Studios, and everybody knows when they sign up to play in our sandbox, those are the rules,” says Feige. “My only guess is, at Warner Bros., that would be a change of the rules. But I think they’re changing the rules right now over in Hall H.”

As for whether DC will be able to achieve success in a sandbox of their own, Anthony Russo seems skeptical, if only because Marvel’s own man with a plan won’t be involved. “This has all come together on the shoulders of Kevin Feige,” says Anthony. “I don’t know if others can do it.”

His brother Joe is a little more sanguine. “What’s great is that Zack is doing it, and there’s a continuity there,” he says. “You need a creative voice to pull a thread through these films.” Nobody questions Snyder’s bona fides as a creator with a vision. Still, though–maybe Warner Brothers should consider a little judicious recruiting from their competitors.

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